i am just putting the finishing touches on my tire dummy, essentially a 6x6 with half tiers bolted on it and a sidekick (http://thewarrior.com/warriors/rodman.htm) in between the tires. over the years i found that some of the best equipment i use is home made. i was wondering if any of you are willing to share any of your home made contraptions, how to use them or how to improve an existing product to help in training. i will postpics of my tire dummy as soon as i finish itthanksH.

I can't wait to see it! I am moving, and the new place will give me a bit of room to add some equipment. I want to build a stick dummy, but it sounds like the one you are constructing is much cooler in concept. I was just going to build what would more or less be a big "K" for sinawali practice.

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Here's a tip for aquiring truck tires. Look in the phone directory under tires and you'll find those companies that specialize in truck tires. They are usually delighted to get rid of the old used ones. Sometimes they'll even deliver. Apparently it's a pain in the neck for them to get rid of them.

Regular tires make great targets. You can hang them from a rope or even stack them. I've even seen dummies made from tires. You can stand on them to challenge your balance during drills. For drills where you need to stay put you can put one foot in a tire or put several pairs in a line for footwork drills like the football players used to do. One word of caution if you leave your tires outdoors watch for scorpions or spiders as they may make a home out of your tires.

a good friend of mine has one inch surgical tubing tided to a weight lifters belt, the other end bolted into the wall, the person strapped in moves out until there is tension and a fair amount of load on the tubingfrom that position we box do mitt drills knife fight, it really helps with explosive entries weight transfer etc. only problem is when you lose your balance or get hit , you end up flying into the wall

A friend of mine takes volleyballs/soccer-balls/basket-balls/etc. He cuts a 90 degree incision and then fills it to about 10 lbs or so with sand (Bigger balls for heavier weights) through a funnel. Any extra room is filled with something far lighter (cous-cous, sawdust, rice, etc) and then he wraps it to hell and back in duct-tape. The outer couple of layers are tack-tape (handle-bar tape, tennis-grip tape, etc) for grip. There you have it: a cheap and easy Medicine Ball. In my experience, Sand from a construction site (the cement mixers guys never seem to care about giving up some sand in exchange for some cold soda or snacks) can be next to free and balls from a thrift shop go for pocket change. A small cost for Duct Tape and you've saved a decent chunk of change over the cost of a professionally produced Medicine Ball. ~Scott (Emir/Pencak Silat Sharaf)

Punong Guro Edgar Sulite made such a ball for me back in 1990-- which is quite a bit before the modern medicine ball craze He also gave me a couple of special exercises, which now that I write about them here I remind myself I need to get back to them

Okay, Okay. Now that everyone's had a laugh Lets get back to home made equipment. My long time training partner uses a ball hanging from a string for practicing slipping, foot work, and target practice. He started with a tennis ball but now uses a much smaller plastic ball. It doesn't sound like much but it makes a huge difference.

There is a youtube clip of one of Sonny Umpad's students using a ball on a string for footwork. Im currently at work so I cant post the video.Ill try when I get home.

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This is the most basic version of pendulum we use in our system - i.e. ball on a string, for practicing sikaran. There are many others of various configurations and combinations of fiberglass rod, elastic tubing, softballs, duct tape and machetes that we use to train.

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Thanks for the cool link. The way my friend Vince used the pendulum ball was at head level much like a boxer would practice slipping. He did that to fine tune his eyes after lazik eye surgery. It's amazing how much better one gets once they could see Nowadays we use it more for target practice and to practice side stepping as well.

Hi Tony,Yes, we have one similar to the one in the clip - one about shoulder height and one about knee height, but we have blades on the ends Hit one end and the other comes around and hits you! Sonny called it "the frustrater"!

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I recently made a tire dummy out of motorcycle tires. There available out back of any sport bike dealer. When they change sport bike tires they just pitch the rubber. To make u can make it stationary or put it on wheels. As for the wheeled one you can buy a round hard wood disc @ home depot drill holes for wheels and install heavy duty locking wheels so that you can lock one side and work ur foot work around the dummy. If ur on a budget just buy pre made trash can wheels on a plastic base,its not as durable as the first one but will cost about $30.00 compared to $60.00. Take ur base, drill 4 holes in between the holes install 1 1/2 inch 1/4 in bolts, nut, washer blue lock tight. Take a med car tire mark ur bolt pattern in car tire drill insert bolts washer nut lock tight. Now take the motor cycle tires stack them first to see the dummy shape and continue to drill, washer, insert, nut, lock tight. Its important to washer both sides with good size washers so the rubber doesn't pull out & don't forget blue lock tight. Now you have a rock solid tire dummy for sticks, kicks, shin conditioning,ect. Now put on ur personal touches. I drilled in a hole for one of those cheez ball executive punching bags you can get @ big 5 for $20.00 the one made for your desk it just screws into the hole lock tight it down & u have a kick ass head on a spring .Use fiber glass rods staggered & drilled through to the other side and attached with metal cable or hose clamps the kind on ur car radiator hoses. Attach tennis balls for hands, arms get covered with pool noddles & duct tape hands and arms well. Throw a 10 lb sand bag down the hole & there u have it.This dummy moves well on a smooth floor. Hit, chase, trap ,cut with live blades & customize to your liking. Ill try to roll a pic soon. Enjoy WOOF WOOF

I have an old tried and true quickie here. My kids old teather ball stand (you know the steal pole set into a tire base filled with concrete), I wraped the pole with old home carpet padding that was removed from my neighbors house (free 2 me) and then duck tapped it from top to bottom. Its good for stick and also forearm/shin conditioning, etc.

Not as sweat as yours but its a quick fix on a small budget, you can use live blades on it also then just add some more duck tape for easy repair.

tires are awesome to swing a stick at,but i have also been working with an old moving blanket suspended by a ropei found it hard to swing through it so i find it helps with developing power and i also switch toa tennis ball on a rope it moves all over the place i find it promotes foot work

moving blanket $10 at u-haultennis ball $1 at the dollar storerope $12 home depotthe looks from my neighbours when i am beating the hell out of a blanket and tennis Ball.............. priceless

I "rescued" this from the dumpster at work it is a 185lb "dragging dummy" I guess the SWAT guys got tired of dragging around or got money for a new one. I was thinking of either hanging it for tire-type drills or mounting to the wall like a wooden dummy. If you had one what would do with? More specifically how would incorporate it into your training?

I "rescued" this from the dumpster at work it is a 185lb "dragging dummy" I guess the SWAT guys got tired of dragging around or got money for a new one. I was thinking of either hanging it for tire-type drills or mounting to the wall like a wooden dummy. If you had one what would do with? More specifically how would incorporate it into your training?

I have one of those, I use it for grappling drills (ground work), for stick work and some limited striking, its arms get in the way for combos, unless you can find a way to bind them into a "guard position".Its great for anatomical reference and such.

tires are awesome to swing a stick at,but i have also been working with an old moving blanket suspended by a ropei found it hard to swing through it so i find it helps with developing power and i also switch toa tennis ball on a rope it moves all over the place i find it promotes foot work

moving blanket $10 at u-haultennis ball $1 at the dollar storerope $12 home depotthe looks from my neighbours when i am beating the hell out of a blanket and tennis Ball.............. priceless

Have you considered running something through the middle of the moving blanket? A long piece of rattan or something? Would that make it harder or easier to swing through? I am assuming that the blanket is rolled up?

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sorry it has taken so long to replyi tied a knot at the end of the blanket and just hung it ,the open blanket seems to almost grab the stickwhen it wraps around during impact. i like it because it makes you swing through and i find it helps with weapon retentionfor now i am just swinging into the blanket bUT i also use other things as well to change the response of the impact. tiers, logs and other rattan sticks

New to the DBMA community. Outstanding forum and awesome talent here! Look forward to contributing.

Interested in seeing if anyone has used the stick trainer illustrated at www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIK9iyubyQc&feature=related (advance to + 42sec)? Appears to complement a standard fixed-position WC style trainer. Simple design and principles. An effective method for practicing flow drills?

I am very happy to see you here. Thank you very much for sending me the pictures you took in Hawaii of me working with Daniel, with the sea turtles, and of Dogzilla-- and thank you for your able assistance at the seminar in Chinatown.

As for the training device, I had seen this concept with shorter stick, but duh! -- it had not occurred to me to use longer and heavier sticks. I like it

I'm going to have to look harder to see if any footage exists of Maestro Sonny's "Frustrator" in use . Like the one shown, there are 2 sticks hung from a center rope, one at knee and the other at shoulder level. But unlike the one shown, Sonny added blades to the ends and devised a way to connect the sticks to the central rope in such a way that they could spin 360 degrees in opposite directions without twisting the rope up. He also left the low end free so the sticks would swing round more randomly.The MAIN difference in Sonny's exercises from other versions I've seen is that the practitioner does not stay in front of the sticks. Sonny wanted his students to cross from one side to the other, not just left and right, but stepping through the central point to the other side (trying to get to the back of the opponent). He wanted at least one foot to touch the point directly under the center (or as close as possible) before ending up 180 degrees to where you started. This would sometimes involve stepping over the lower stick, ducking under or fading round the end of the upper stick and of course blocking, redirecting and striking as you went....that's why the device got it's name

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@ Jonobos - ...Success? ...Hmmm, well I guess it would depend on how you define it! Training with it certainly gave you a great appreciation of how blocking/striking to one side leaves you wide open on the other, and how it's hard to keep track of high, low, left and right at the same time It was certainly good at training the eyes to perceive motion, improving the peripheral vision, getting blocks up fast, keeping the feet light and looking for the open space between the moving objects instead of the focusing on the weapons themselves.Maestro Sonny was all about having an exit aswell as an entry and it was good training for that.

@ Crafty Dog -I will try to see what I can find, though it is more likely to by my lame ass attempts captured on tape, not his ...though I do remember him demonstrating it ..... If the worst comes to the worst I'll try to get together a clip of us working with it now.

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What if you added a third stick at the top and stabalized it more so it would not bob up and down as much as the others. From one side you could dangle a ball of some sort to simulate a target like the head? So the top most stick would rotate but not move up and down as much, and aside from not getting hit you would have a clear target to shoot for. If it was on the other side of the "frustrator" you would have to zone over into range and hit it... at which point it would spin around and you would have to go after it...

I am not sure if my description of that is clear at all It also may be far to complicated of a training tool

« Last Edit: October 05, 2008, 07:37:47 PM by Jonobos »

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Guro Eddy Deutsch showed me some great footage Maestro Sonny Umpads home made training tools.The one I built was a 2 foot dowel with a 5 in foam ball on the inside & 3 in foam balls on the two ends. Balance a strong piece of fishing line to be attached to the ceiling directly in the middle of the dowel. Run it through the foam ball ,duct tape the entire piece hang it and flow. Although this device was not intended for hard contact u could make it out of hard rubber balls and a fiber glass rod and smash and slash. I love this training tool, it moves erratically & allows u to move 360 degrees on an uneven plain Its set about shoulder high and because its not anchored to the ground moving through and under is mandatory. Anything can be used as a training devise it how u use it. Ill try to get a pic up soon. Maija:If u cant find good footage of the frustrator I think Eddy has vid he might share of some of Sonny's training devises. Woof Woof